Not a chapter, I'm sorry to say, but Falling Petals will be returning in a new version after this summer. I fish commercially during the summer, and given its usually hectic nature I would have slowed down to 1-per-week even if I had been continuing forward with this version, and the quality might have been questionable. But it's an excellent opportunity for me to get the new version of this off the ground in preparation for an autumn re-release! :)

When I'd begun writing Falling Petals in this iteration, it wasn't the first time that I'd tried to write it. I may have written a ('meager') hundred pages between all prior versions of this setting, but I always moved to delete everything I'd written. I never thought I actually had it in me to write, because I was so often dropping everything I ever started that I felt just dreadful about the possibility that I might drop something that someone might actually enjoy (though I very much doubted that such was a realistic fear).

But I nonetheless pushed myself to actually releasing it for once, and although the first few days afterwards I was gripped with a bit of paralyzing fear: I wrote the next one and released it as soon as that relented, then the third in the next day, and I started to find it rather fun. Then I wrote and released daily for a week, and I found that I actually enjoyed reading my own work, to the point where I stopped reading much of anything else. I slowed down considerably after releasing the 8K word chapter 8, in part because the strain started to set into my arms. Still, I couldn't resist to write even then, so I limped out another chapter before the pain set it too drastically for me to actually continue. I missed a whole week of it, and fell into a slight melancholy, and I very much worried that I wouldn't be able to get it back. So I pushed a release I wasn't sure about just to get myself going again, and I was endlessly relieved that this worked! I was writing again, and what a joy that was!

Though my releases have been more scattered of late (some 1 day apart, others 5 (largely to be certain not to strain my arms)), it was a joy to write the whole time, and I'm now quite secure in the knowledge that I very much can keep it up, and it's been tremendously good for me to do something productive (and non-consumptive) with my life again :) I've got a confidence back in me that has been missing for years now, and it's wonderful to know that this part of me didn't simply disappear. It's back, and for good it would seem :) This is absolutely what I want to do with my life, so I'm acting on it now, rather than bringing this version to a comfortable close.

It's my intention to give this story all of the attention it deserves. I spent a while focusing on and better planning the story's events out, and I found that this was incompatible with continuing as it was (mostly unplanned, with unspecified intentions). I mean to make all of the characters shine, to re-emphasize the overarching situation (does anyone still remember that the village was attacked? No, of course not, because I put that to the backdrop! >___< ), and to reorder events to provide for plenty of high moments as well (as it's vitally necessary in contrast to the pits of despair I drop my poor characters in). It will be fundamentally the same story, this much hasn't changed; just refined, emphasized, and perfected! :D

I'm really looking forward to releasing the next (and finalized) version in September ^__^ I'll update once more then to say when it's up, and I hope to see you all come autumn! ^____^ Thank you so much for reading this, I really hope to impress you with the next version! If you want to get ahold of me to find out how the new version is coming along over the summer, my discord is https://discord.gg/Q5xRZKp here (don't know if that works, but it's also in my bio). I intend to note my progress there as it forms up. I'm hoping to release thirty chapters in September, when I have ample time to be certain of their quality.